So he went through frame by frame, removing the more bloodthirsty moments – and any pubic hair. Nevertheless De Palma was worried that the gore, and the full-frontal nudity in Dressed to Kill, would see it lumbered with a commercially disastrous X rating, the category for extreme violence and pornography. (De Palma Sr also wrote an unpublished thriller called The Anatomist, about a doctor who murdered “to satisfy his necrophiliac sexual urges”.) “Blood is a terrific visceral force,” he told New York magazine in 1980, “And I have no intellectual squeamishness about it.” As a teenager, he would watch while his father, a surgeon, amputated limbs in the operating theatre. Nor has De Palma ever been afraid of gore. I just do what I think is right for the film.” “Being politically correct has never been my problem. De Palma considered it “the best murder scene” he had ever done.ĭe Palma has repeatedly said he would rather film an “attractive woman” getting killed than a guy like Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.” Kate is seemingly punished for her extramarital liaison when later, in an elevator, she meets a brutal end at the hands of a disguised transgender killer, armed with a straight-edged razor. “Every tall bus and truck came down while we were shooting and all they saw through the window was me getting laid in the back seat,” Dickinson recalled. The encounter ends with Kate and the stranger having sex in the back of a taxi in a busy street. “I was always too captivated by the brilliance of the chase through the museum to be quite as disturbed as many of my feminist friends by the misogyny in Dressed to Kill,” admitted Susan Dworkin, author of Double De Palma (1984). Kate plays a cat-and-mouse game to entice a stranger and De Palma uses subliminal clues, sound effects (the click-clacking of high heels) and a noirish score by Pino Donaggio to amp up the suspense. This brilliantly sustained nine-minute sequence, entirely without dialogue, is the most technically accomplished in the film. What are people supposed to get erotic about? An elephant?”Īfter her rape dream, Kate decides to pick up a stranger at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “But so could an innocent billboard of a woman cutting a melon. “I suppose there are rapists and murderers walking around just waiting to be triggered, and this could do it,” she replied. When the film came out, People asked Dickinson whether the shower scene perpetuated the ideology that pain and humiliation are essential to a women’s sexuality. Dickinson was 48 at the time and De Palma hired an “abdominal stand-in”: the naked breasts we see in the scene belong to 23-year-old Victoria Lynn Johnson, 1978 Penthouse “pet of the year”. The premise was, for many critics, unforgivable still worse was its titillating treatment, in soft-lens close-ups of Kate soaping her body. De Palma claimed that the fantasy of “being forcibly attacked by a faceless stranger is very prevalent”. The writer-director’s film script about a “woman’s erotic fantasy life” opens with Kate, bored by marital sex, fantasising about being raped in the shower by “a madman” with his hand “clamped across her mouth” while her oblivious spouse is shaving. Gordon, who later became a director, said the film had to be watched “in an analytical way” to grasp its depth. Amid the gore of Dressed to Kill, they saw wit and social commentary. To his fans, De Palma – who had made Carrie four years earlier, and would go on to direct The Untouchables and Scarface – had made an ingenious, stylised homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho. The “whodunit” revolves around a sleazy homicide detective (Dennis Franz) and an untrustworthy psychiatrist ( Michael Caine). To solve the crime, Liz teams up with Miller’s teenage son, a computer geek played by Keith Gordon. The film starred De Palma’s wife, Nancy Allen, as Liz Blake, a sex worker who witnesses the murder of suburban housewife Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) by a mystery blonde. “I get offended when I get thrown in with them.” “Dressed to Kill is not a slash-and-splatter film,” he said. Its director, Brian De Palma, couldn’t see what the fuss was about. The film being shown inside was Dressed to Kill, a thriller about a transgender killer, which objectified women, glamorised rape and fetishised violence. In 1980, Women Against Pornography held a mass protest outside a New York cinema their placards read: Rape is not a fantasy, it’s a nightmare.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |